The Passage Print

Diana Dean RCA, a Resident Salt Spring Island oil painter and sculptor Diana Dean is considered to be one of Canada's foremost artists. Born in 1942, from English parents, in the dry, spacious landscape of Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, living there for eight years, then moving to South Africa for two years. At the age of ten Diana and her family left Africa and returned to England. This stark contrast in scenery and lifestyle has had a lasting influence on her life and work. Diana began painting at the age of fourteen, and attended the Bath Academy of Art in Corsham, England, from where she graduated with a distinction in Sculpture in 1964 and commenced her life as a professional artist while raising a family of her own.In 1982, Dean found her real vision in the natural beauty of the West Coast of British Columbia, Canada, where she has produced a large collection of sculpture and paintings many of which sit in some of the finest collections ranging from Norway to Great Britain, Canada and the United States.Dean's canvases are often richly allegorical or mythic, open to interpretation. Her work touches deeply on the spiritual, emphasizing the contrast between light and dark but also allowing for vast amounts of colour. The subject matter is timeless in that it simultaneously embraces the past, present and future. According to Dean, "Painting is a way that I can experience total freedom from gender, from body, from barriers. To push forward into the unknown, making further connections with Nature; the freedom to create new forms. What other medium can do this?" "My painting is a journey of bringing together my personal experience of the world, inner and outer, with the magic of painting materials and their properties of colour and consistency reflecting the marriage of matter and inspiration. My work is about relationship: of my inner nature to the world, of man and woman, of mother and child, of wind and sky, of colour and brush. Relationship of geometric and organic, of sharp line and curve. The relationship of a look to the focus of the story. The relationship of opposites, dark and light, near and far, the mythical in the everyday, all is in relationship. My search is to find the essence of my inner vision, to be with it as I paint - to be totally open and connected." Diana B.A. Dean.